Community fiber optics is the way to go. In Bucharest, in 2000, when fiber was really expensive a small community, like a block of apartments, would get much better quality service by sharing a business type of connection than buying for each apartment a "home/personal" service. The initial cost is that someone needs to step up, build the infrastructure and start the sharing service. In Western countries this might be a little bit more difficult than it was in Bucharest in 2000 because of the regulation regarding wires, cable tunnels etc. However it is not impossible and the benefits of such a service in the community exceeds the initial pain of setting up the service.

In Bucharest, experience showed that once a community connected to internet via a dedicated fiber service, self maintained, the neighbouring blocks and adjacent residential areas start to press for connecting to the same service. Soon a network serving 30 families, grew to 100 then 500 or even more. A single connection became 4 load balancing the load. You had a problem with your connectivity? Just pick up the phone and call a guy 10 houses away from yours.

I may not be very accurate about the prices in 2000 but the first connection we had in our block was a 350 euro/ month + 150 set up fee for a 100Mbs bandwidth with no traffic limit. In my block 27 families out of 36 decided to join the network and the initial set up of the fiber + local ethernet infrastructure cost was split among residents. No filtering, no connection throttling, no interference. We were paying 15 euro per month to cover some maintenance cost and future failures of cables and routers. These 100 Mbps are not much they were 100 Mbps were steady. The thing is that when we upgraded our link to a 500 euro/month we got 250 Mbps. So bandwidth and cost don't scale linearly. The more people in your network the better the service.

Maintaining a large network can be a pain. However, if you give incentives to the sys admin, and the does a good job by deploying a network with little quarks, he can actually have a passive income without much of a hassle. Networks with more than 2000 families generally had a team of 1-3 sys admins taking care of the network full time.

We also had the traditional cable companies offering a package of TV + phone + internet based on coaxial cable. Their offering was so inferior to the "neighbourhood network". The large companies ended up by stepping up their game and offering similar quality services. They were actually struggling to keep up the pace. The local networks, created around 2004-2005 a backbone network which allowed every "neighbourhood network" to connect to the other networks via high speed 10Gbps fiber cables. This became later the ANISP a national association. Yes, the small networks were in the end bought by large companies but at least the standard was set high enough so that it cannot be rolled back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Romania